How it took 37 days to ruin the country

By Alice Thomson

12:00AM BST 29 Mar 2001

IT started with a boil. A vet noticed that 27 pigs at the Cheale Meats abattoir in Essex were looking lethargic on February 19. Then he saw the sores. He had been too young for the last major outbreak in 1967, but he feared that it was foot and mouth.

The sores caused alarm at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. Within 48 hours, the outbreak had been traced back to a farm in Heddon-on-the-Wall in Northumberland. The war against the pan-asiatic virus type O had begun.

British food exports were halted by the European Commission. Supermarkets began running out of meat. Cheltenham was threatened. There were rumours that the disease could be carried 100 miles on the wind.

At first, the Prime Minister appeared to have the crisis under control. He listened to Ben Gill, the president of the National Farmers' Union. In an interview on his Downing Street website, he said the outbreak was "devastating" and the situation "grave". The message went out: the countryside is closed.

But instead of handing over operations to his best generals, he put his juniors, Nick Brown and Lady Hayman, in charge of stamping out the disease. Farmer Brown and Hayman may have suitable countryside names, but they were given little more than hessian sacks to control the crisis. They were one step behind events, outflanked by the virus, which soon spread to Devon.

Tony Blair didn't want to risk images of the Army shooting everything that moved. When the Armed Forces were finally allowed to help, they were forced into a logistical role, well back from the front line. It took 36 days before they were asked to assist with the cull: Lady Hayman's excuse was that they didn't have a licence to slaughter.

Within a week, Mr Blair seemed to have forgotten the countryside crisis. At his Camp David meeting with President Bush, the subject was hardly mentioned. Foot and mouth had saved Mr Blair from the potentially embarrassing Liberty and Livelihood March: people spoke of him having all the luck. The Prime Minister could still go to his country retreat, Chequers, and use the swimming pool and tennis court.

When Gordon Brown stood up to give his Budget speech on March 7, he offered Britain a £4 billion pre-election bonanza - but he gave only £152 million to the farmers. The Government was on a high. Its worry was Vaz, rather than vaccination. Labour's support in the opinion polls was going up more steeply than the number of new cases. On March 12, when Ireland accused Britain of mishandling the crisis, Mr Blair could shrug it off.

But slowly public opinion was beginning to shift. The first pyres had been erected. Animal lovers living in towns now joined the Cumbrian farmers in their horror at lambs being led to slaughter.

After a fortnight, the tourism industry, worth £8 billion a year, was feeling the strain. Not since the Gulf war had bookings fallen so dramatically. Chambermaids, waiters and gardeners were suffering as much as their employers.

The Government's answer was to set up a taskforce on March 13 under Michael Meacher. Mr Meacher and Nick Brown appeared to be operating from different battleplans. As Mr Brown ordered the public to retreat from the countryside, Mr Meacher instructed them to advance to the roadside cafes.

On March 14, when the Prince of Wales said he would donate £500,000 to help farmers, he seemed to have caught the public mood. Mr Blair still kept his distance and Mr Brown was told to reiterate that he was "absolutely certain" he had the virus "under control".

But reports were coming back of ministry delays and mix-ups. Diagnosis was taking three days, diseased animals were waiting for slaughter for four days, corpses were lying rotting on piles even longer in the damp, cold weather. All this helped to spread the disease. Farmers, isolated on their farms, were getting no feedback. Maff didn't lay on enough emergency help, put off by employment law red tape and expense.

Instead of tackling the backlog of sick animals, Mr Brown announced, on March 15, that the cull would be extended to include all susceptible farm livestock within a two-mile radius in areas of high infection. Two hours later, he corrected this to exclude cattle. It was pandemonium on the battlefield.

What did Mr Blair do? On March 20, he launched a global charm offensive to reassure tourists that they would still find a green and pleasant land, not a septic isle. Yet Mr Blair didn't want to go to the countryside. Ministers were sent to New York in preference to Cumbria and Devon.

The 1969 official report, by the Duke of Northumberland's committee of inquiry, suggested that burning would only aggravate the problem, and that burial was better. But the Government was more interested in digging up scapegoats than dusty reports and for the first three weeks continued with its slaughter-and-burn policy.

First, the blame was put on the farmer on whose farm the first outbreak was detected. Next it was the turn of the supermarkets, whom Mr Blair started to criticise. This week, the Government, behind the hand, spread the report that a Chinese restaurant was to blame: it might have imported illegal meat, which found its way into pigswill. The Government refused to confirm this on the record.

Mr Blair also threw out remarks about farming methods, and yesterday spoke of a need to return to the "first principles" (ploughing with oxen?) of farming. Number 10 was privately briefing that Maff wasn't up to it. The hapless chief vet, sent to places where ministers did not want to show their faces, has taken the brunt of the farmers' anger.

But the Government did not succeed in avoiding all the blame for the enemy's rapid advance. As the Chief Scientist, Professor David King, said on March 23: "If we proceed as we are at the moment, the epidemic is out of control . . . in the worst-case scenario, out of control means we might even lose 50 per cent of the livestock."

For the first month, while farmers desperately tried to protect their herds, Mr Blair was worrying that his sacred cow, the May 3 general election, would be thrown on the pyres. Opinion polls showed that the public increasingly found this rush to the ballot box distasteful.

Alastair Campbell insisted that the Prime Minister wasn't "remotely focused" on the election. But on the very same day, when Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission, asked Mr Blair at Stockholm whether he had a month to decide, an ashen-faced Mr Blair replied: "No, about 10 days."

Finally, in the fifth week of the crisis, Mr Blair recognised the severity of the situation: it dawned on him that the plague was about to kill off May 3. He activated Cobra, the emergency room in Downing Street, and made it clear he was in charge of beating the virus. Suddenly, ministers who had earlier been told to rule out vaccination were paving the way for a U-turn. Mr Blair yesterday made it clear that tourism, not agriculture, is his priority. He issued an urgent appeal to the public to return to the countryside . . . so long as they don't go near farms.

The virus has run through the alphabet, from a farm at Armathwaite to Zeal Monachorum. The total number of animals identified for slaughter has reached 719,000. The total number still to be slaughtered is 278,000. Since the Prime Minister has taken personal control, the number of animals awaiting slaughter has risen by more than 70 per cent.

So who are the heroes and villains so far? Maff and Mr Brown emerge as being out of their depth. They did well initially in banning the movement of livestock, but weren't up to the logistical exercise of a mass cull. They failed to call for help when they needed it.

Other parts of the Government haven't helped. John Prescott, the Secretary for Environment and the Regions, hasn't taken any responsibility. Mr Meacher's taskforce sends contradictory messages to the public.

Mr Blair hasn't been on top of the subject. Instead he has focused on winning his second term. At his door must be laid the failure to consider wider policy issues, such as vaccination, and the constant proclamations, believed by hardly anyone, that the countryside is open for business.

He must accept the blame for the delay in deploying the Armed Forces. He refused to listen in time to warnings from anyone who represented groups of which he was suspicious - hunts, country people, rural MPs. It took about as long for the truth to reach Downing Street as it takes to travel from Penrith to London on horseback. Because he delayed in Cumbria, the disease was allowed to spiral out of control.

Heroes include farmers and rural businessmen, such as small hoteliers, who are battening down the hatches and getting on with their non-life, with no money coming in and no prospect of compensation unless their livestock is slaughtered. Others to emerge with credit include Prince Charles, the vets destroying their own livelihood, and the Tories who, though initially slow, have acted like the responsible opposition that they have so often failed to be.

When Mr Blair visited the Queen this week, it must have been an embarrassing audience. He would have had to admit that he had lost control of the disease and that parts of the countryside had been laid to waste. When he returns to ask her permission for Parliament to be dissolved, the Queen will expect his assurance that he is winning the war. Yesterday, in the House of Commons, he had to admit that he couldn't possibly give such a commitment.